How Gasly wrestled control of Ocon’s team –

But the reality of life with Alpine did not live up to the encouraging start, prompting Gasly to declare that “there is potential for great results”.

But he succeeded in achieving a decisive victory in a battle in which there was always destined to be only one winner.

By spending big money to get Gasly out of his Red Bull contract to plug the gap left by the double losses of Fernando Alonso and Oscar Piastri for 2023, Alpine has concocted a fantastic scenario. Given the turbulent relationship between the pair, it seemed that only one of them, Gasly or current incumbent Esteban Ocon, would be around beyond the end of this year. That has proven to be the case, with Ocon moving to Haas and Gasly locking up a spot for 2025 and beyond last month.

However, despite occasional points of tension such as their collision in Australia last year and on the opening lap in Monaco this season, the battle has generally been played out in a less tense manner.

Gasly has proven his worth through the way he works with the team behind the scenes as well as through his performance on the track.

He has always been a hard worker behind the scenes. At times during his unsuccessful half-season with Red Bull Racing in 2019, some in the team felt guilty of trying to change things too much, but the 28-year-old has shown he has learned from that experience with the approach he has taken over the past 18 months at Alpine.

“It was completely natural,” Gasly said when asked by The Race how the team secured his support and gave him a new deal.

“I am a very driven person, very focused on my work and I try to be very close to the people I work with. I am very demanding of myself and I demand the same of the people I work with.

“I gained good experience in Formula 1 in different environments, working with different people, and this helped me understand the mentality and team spirit and how to deal with it.

“The first phase was trying to see the dynamics within the team. It was just trying to push my own limits on and off the track, and then go back to the factory to push the team in the same direction.

“I don’t feel like I did anything specific because everything is natural to me. This is my vision of working with the team. The confidence I have in the players and they have confidence in me has increased during the first season and this year.

“It hasn’t been an easy period. Last year wasn’t as good as we would have liked, but we came out with three podiums as a team, and this year is obviously more difficult for them and for me.

“Personally, it’s not good to perform like this, but at the same time I really see the effort they’re putting in and I’m very sure that with the kind of mentality we have at the moment, there will be a turnaround and we’ll be able to get the performance out of the team.”

Gasly did most of the hard work at Alpine and chose to stay with him long term over Ocon last year. In the first half of the season it was a close race between the two but overall in the second half of the season Gasly was the more impressive driver.

It wasn’t a landslide, but it was enough. And it was partly a result of him pushing for changes to his team’s approach, which has contributed positively to the team’s evolution in how they do things after the management changes that took place in August 2023.

In short, while at Red Bull he was floundering and over-exaggerating trying to keep up with Max Verstappen to the point where the team insisted he stop skewing setups, at Alpine Gasly played his part and asserted himself slowly and constructively.

“It came from both sides as the team was very good at giving me the freedom and transparency I needed to build confidence at the start,” says Gasly.

“It was about having very open channels of communication about how they work, how I work, what they like, what I like, and trying to find a healthy place for everyone.

“They also know my way, I’m an information person, I like to understand what we do in the car, the way we do things and why we do them that way.

“They were good at being transparent and honest and gave me the freedom I needed.

“As a driver, I am someone who needs my own space. I have my own personality. I need my own space to give my best on and off the track, and they have been very good at providing that.”

In keeping with the on-track performance shift in his favour, Gasly points out that he felt like an integral part of the team in the fall of 2023. This was evident in the way the battle with Ocon developed. While Gasly wasn’t destroying his teammate, he was taking the lead.

“I think from the end of September last year, until October, I was feeling really good,” Gasly said. “We started this year in a better place than we were at the end of last year.

“We spend a lot of time together and the more time you spend with people, the more you get to know them. I find that you are more efficient at dealing with each other and have a better understanding.

It’s no secret why you see men like Louis [Hamilton] Working for a long time with the same race engineer, because you build that trust and that communication process where no one is afraid to tell things like they are, whether they’re good or bad.

“You know it’s productive and you know from which angle you have to exploit it. It’s the efficiency that may not always bring more every day, but over the course of a full season there are situations that mean you make the right choice. It means you make the right changes because they understand exactly what you need and that’s where you find the few hundred remaining performances.”

Gasly showed his confidence in the solid foundation he has built when he spoke publicly about the efforts he has made to keep the relationship with Ocon on an equal footing in an interview with F1’s Beyond the Net It’s important to note that this was just his side of the story, but he did point out the need to “manage Esteban and manage the way we interact, and stay away from me.” It seemed like a clear message to Alpine that he was the most motivated person to make the team work.

At the start of this year, the talk in Alpine circles was that Gasly was already the long-term favourite and that Ocon, who had been with the team since 2020, was very likely to be replaced.

This impression was well established long before the Monaco crash that prompted Alpine and Ocon to announce their split, with Ocon recently confirmed as a driver for the Haas team in 2025.

“I knew that coming here with Esteban who knows the team, who knows the processes, who knows each one of them, it would take some time for me to be able to build the position I am in today,” Gasly said.

“It was never easy, but as with everything, I believe putting in the right effort is the right way to get the result.

“There was a clear desire on the part of the team to make it work and make the workspace the best it could be. We just came together in the right place.

“The team has been really good at this and we’ve been able to get to a place where we’re doing very well.

“We have changed from where we were when I arrived – we have put some things in place in terms of communication and in terms of operations.

“In the beginning, when I was in the simulator, there were a few different things that allowed me to get closer to people and have them better understand what’s good and what’s bad. We have this conversation and exchange of information that benefits all of us.”

This work was important for Gasly because based on on-track performances this year, the statistics are largely in Ocon’s favor. The picture has been muddied by Alpine’s many problems and occasional spec discrepancies, but Ocon had a slight advantage in qualifying. Gasly has a points advantage, six to five, but the overall picture is still a very close race.

But what Gasly had to rely on was the work done off the track that convinced the team management that he was the one to bet on for the future.

But is that a good thing or not? That’s another question. While Ocon seems happy to be making his way to a less politically charged Haas team, Gasly may be wondering if becoming Alpine’s long-term main man is the prize he initially thought he was working for.